Archives For Inception

This weekend I was flipping through my satellite guide looking for stuff to watch. It a pastime I quite enjoy. Sometimes I enjoy it more than actually watching anything. I search through the week to find interesting shows and documentaries and movies for my DVR to record. Of course, I record so much stuff that I barely watch half of it, but sometimes I make some great discoveries. Take, for example, the best movie I ever watched on my DVR: Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. It played on The Movie Network HD, and actually looked pretty decent, but better still it instantly become one of my very favourite films of all time. We’re talking Top 5 here.

Anyway, that was a couple of years ago, and since then I’d deleted the film to make room for unwatched episodes of Fringe. But this weekend, while flipping through my guide I saw that The Apartment was set to play on MGM-HD, so I instantly set it to record. The next day I sat down to watch the film, and I was actually pretty excited. Except, this is what I saw:

Compare that shot to the one above it. In case you can’t tell the difference, I’ll help you out. The version of the film I was watching had the sides of the frame chopped off in order to fit on a 16×9 HDTV without any black bars.

Like this:

A lot of films are coming out this week. Too many. One of the most highly anticipated of these upcoming releases is David Fincher’s remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It’s a film which, to be honest, most people wouldn’t be all that excited about if it wasn’t for the name attached. Fincher is one of the very best directors working today, and seeing him return to serial killer drama, even if it’s a remake, is certainly something worth getting excited about. I very much liked the film, though I do think it suffers from certain problems derived from the source material. (You can read my review of the film over at Sound on Sight .) Now that The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is finally coming out, I think it’s time to see what we can look forward to from Fincher in the near future, as well as take stock of his success as a director. Click to read more

Late last year, there was a discussion about whether the high box office totals for films like Inception, The Social Network, True Grit, The King’s Speech and Black Swan was a sign that audiences were actually seeking out high-quality “original” films. This discussion actively ignored the fact that audiences do not at all behave that way. Instead, mainstream audiences always have and always will look for films that they think they will like. This usually involves getting a sense from trailers and marketing that they know what kind of story they’re getting and where it’s going. It’s very rare that audiences will look at a film like Inception and say “I have no idea what that thing is, but I really want to see it!” And even in the case of Inception, the simple premise of entering people’s dreams was probably enough to get people through the door. Audiences aren’t looking for movies that are “good” or “high-quality” or any of that. They are looking for movies that they think will entertain them.

Enter: The Lion King 3D

Disney decided to re-release The Lion King on the big screen—with a gimmicky 3D conversion—on September 16th, as a means to promote the upcoming Blu-ray release. Now, after two weeks at #1 at the domestic box office, Disney has decided to extend the re-release, possibly even past the date of the Blu-ray release. What the hell is happening here? In the last two weekends there have been seven wide release films other than The Lion King. One of those, Straw Dogs, was a remake. The rest are all original, or simply based on books. And The Lion King has beat them all. It’s crazy. It’s also a very bad sign for Hollywood and the theatre industry. Continue Reading…